Tipping in America

Alexander Cockburn: Tipping in America

Hovering somewhere between charity and a bribe, the tip is one of our most polymorphous social transactions. At its most crude it can be a loutish expression of authority and disdain. At its purest it can approach a statement of love. At one end of the scale we had the foul decorum of those old lunch places where the men thought it their right to pat the waitresses on the backside. If a waitress objected to these caresses the tip would be thrown into the dirty plate.

At the other end we have the elevated snobbism of Marcel Proust, for whom the tip was a profound and complex form of social expression. 'When he left,' writes Proust's biographer George Painter of one meal in the Paris Ritz, 'his pockets were empty, and all but one of the staff had been fantastically tipped. "Would you be so kind as to lend me fifty francs," he asked the doorman, who produced a wallet of banknotes with alacrity. "No, please keep it - it was for you"; and Proust repaid the debt with interest the next evening.' Of course he also used tipping for the coarser purpose of inducing certain waiters to partake in those sessions of mutual masturbation which was apparently as far as Proust proceeded in his erotic encounters.

Hanns Sachs who grew up in Vienna at the same time as his 'master and friend' Sigmund Freud wrote a memoir of life in that city in the late nineteenth century in which he devoted some testy pages to the growing complexities of trinkgeld, complexities which he took to be evidence of the decadence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Everybody had their hand out for prescribed portions of trinkgeld - the coachman, the doorman, the hatcheck girl, the waiter, the wine waiter, the headwaiter, the maitre d'hotel:

"Every door which you had to pass was opened for you by someone who demanded a tip; you could not get into the house you lived in after 10 p.m. nor seat yourself in the car in which you wanted to ride without giving a tip. Karl Kraus, Vienna's witty satirist, said the first thing a Viennese would see on the day of Resurrection would be the outstretched hand of the man who opened the door of his coffin."

Doctor Sachs' indignant portrait is clearly reminiscent of today's taxi driver, doorman, hatcheck lady, waiter, and so forth, all of whom, from Manhattan to San Francisco and from Chicago to Corpus Christi expect and usually receive similar trinkgeld. Is America therefore in decline? Visitors to the young republic found to their surprise that coachmen and waiters refused their tips. An organization called the Anti-tipping Society of America, founded in 1905, attracted some hundred thousand members, most of them traveling salesmen. But anti-tipping laws were declared unconstitutional in the same year that Congress passed the Volstead Act, and Americans entered the twenties buying bootleg liquor and tipping big.

Tipping is even bigger money now, with well o